Thursday, July 12, 2012

Most Managers Are Ineffective

Power is the ability to get things done. You could say that
management is the art of ensuring that things get done. Yet what's so striking
about most organizations is that so little management is effective.

That's what academics Heike Bruch and the late Sumantra Ghoshal
discovered when they investigated what they called "decisive purposeful
action." Most companies, far from being hives of busy, effective
executives, could instead be seen as "a few isolated islands of action
amid an ocean of inaction," the researchers found. Does this ring any
bells? It certainly reminded me of many places I've worked -- and run -- where
a small number of people always seemed to be doing the majority of work that
mattered.

Bruch and Ghoshal's study quantified my impression. "What
we found in our research surprised us," the authors write. "Only
about 10 per cent of the managers took purposeful action." The remainder
were busy, just not very effective: 40 per cent were energetic but unfocused;
30 per cent had low energy, little focus and tended to procrastinate; and 10%
were focused, but not very energetic.

No wonder most businesses are so unproductive. What all of this
suggests (and there's plenty of other supporting evidence), is that we waste
most of the human resources we hire. The people around us are either unfocused
(they don't know how to use their energy), uninspired (they've lost their
energy), or distant (they'd rather think than do.) Leadership is about
galvanizing this potential and getting it to move effectively in the right
direction.

The 40 per cent who are energetic but unfocused are the ones you
have to work on. They want to do useful work and are up for a challenge. They
just don't know where to start or how to prioritize. When you have a coherent
strategy, you give this energy meaningful direction. Unfocused energy is rarely
the fault of the individual. Rather, it's an indication that your strategy
isn't sufficiently understood or being translated into goals.

The 30 per cent who have low energy and little focus are tough
nuts to crack. Did they start well and just run out of steam? Are they in the
wrong jobs or the wrong company? There's a high likelihood they started out in
the energetic 40 per cent cohort but became disillusioned and disengaged by their
inability to have an impact. Your best hope is that galvanizing the 40 per cent
creates enough draw within the organization that the best of these get swept
along.

I don't really worry about the focused but less effective 10 per
cent. In my experience, focus is always valuable, even if it's slow. In most
companies, everyone knows who fits into which category. You probably know, too.
The question is: What are you going to do about them?

Management trainingis
clearly not the answer. Studies show that little (14%) good practice transfers
from the classroom to the workplace and with unfocused or low energy people,
that figure becomes significantly worse.

Prosell have been working on the answer to this problem, by
implementing workplace based development, which assesses the capability needed
for specific management roles and then using both support and measurement tools
to identify where managers need to be more effective - and more importantly, how.

I founded ProsellSales
Trainingbecause
I saw the importance of people's potential contribution to a business and also
saw how many companies missed the biggest opportunity they were presented with;
the challenge to fully engage their people and to achieve high productivity and
overall business performance.